Stopping spam emails

[GodLovesCats]

For a long time AOL Mail had a feature that automatically put all spam (which I set to anyone I did not add to my address book) to a spam folder. Not anymore - now some spam mail goes to my New Mail folder and I can't do anything about it. Also the amount of mail in my spam folder skyrocketed last year at the same time some of them fell through the cracks into my New Mail.

I don't know what caused this, but have an idea: open a spam email to unsubscribe. Because I have been able to do this before, I should be able to do it with any email address, right? Would it work for companies that use multiple email addresses?

The only reason I still use AOL Mail is Google has a terrible privacy policy. They spy on account holders for marketing purposes and admit it.

 

[Sabertooth]

Usually hitting "Not spam" on your misdirected "good" mail and hitting "Spam" on your misdirected spam should begin to re-teach the system which is which. It sounds like the internal list got erased somewhere along the lines.

I have had mixed results with "unsubscribe." It seems to work with companies that I have registered for, but makes it worse for those that I did not.

I have multiple email addresses for different purposes,

• one for family & friends contact,
• one for finances &
• one for contests and other spam-inducing pursuits.

The first gets very little spam. The second gets somewhat useful spam. The third gets "anything goes" kind of spam. (I whitelist the latter, throwing everything else away. )

 

[Tone]

For a long time AOL Mail had a feature that automatically put all spam (which I set to anyone I did not add to my address book) to a spam folder. Not anymore - now some spam mail goes to my New Mail folder and I can't do anything about it. Also the amount of mail in my spam folder skyrocketed last year at the same time some of them fell through the cracks into my New Mail.

I don't know what caused this, but have an idea: open a spam email to unsubscribe. Because I have been able to do this before, I should be able to do it with any email address, right? Would it work for companies that use multiple email addresses?

The only reason I still use AOL Mail is Google has a terrible privacy policy. They spy on account holders for marketing purposes and admit it.

Maybe go e-homeless...

 

[Sketcher]

Does the spam have a common flag in the subject? Such as: ***SPAM***

If it does, can you filter it based on whether the subject contains it in AOL? Many regular e-mail programs allow this.

 

[GodLovesCats]

Nope.

 

[paul1149]

The only reason I still use AOL Mail is Google has a terrible privacy policy.

I would recheck aol's privacy policy. They are now owned by Verizon, whose privacy, from what I've seen, is terrible. Yahoo is in the same V. boat. There are other alternatives to gmail, which you can find via a search.

There should be a "spam" function for marking mail, which will train the system.

 

[GodLovesCats]

I don't like any of the free email clients with good privacy policies. They lack features I want.

 

[nonaeroterraqueous]

I use Thunderbird as my email client, and it does a pretty good job of sorting out the spam. You can access AOL mail through an email client, also (I recommend IMAP), which means that you can bring your own spam filter into play, and not have to rely on the server's spam filter.

 

[Petros2015]

Does the spam have a common flag in the subject? Such as: ***SPAM***

lol

 

[Sketcher]

lol

That's what SpamAssassin, a free and popular spam filter that many servers employ, does by default to messages it flags as spam, it adds that to the beginning of the subject line. Barracuda does something similar, it uses brackets instead, like: [SPAM].
It makes client-side filtering really easy.

 

[Petros2015]

Ah I understand what you were saying now.

 

[GodLovesCats]

I noticed most companies so far use one of the same two unsubscribe systems. Two of them could not be unsubscribed.

 

[Vega1]

I recommend Yahoo, it has a good spam filter.

 

[GodLovesCats]

I have Ad Blocker Ultimate installed on Mozilla Firefox. Yahoo has advertisements all over the email page, even with hte ad blocker turned on. At least on AOL the ad blocker works perfectly.

 

[Red Gold]

how does it work?